A Little Visitation - January 9, 2022

Note: Our staff took the entire year of 2021 off from this blog - our last post dated December 28, 2020. We are planning to be back on a weekly basis in 2022. We will post Msgr. Offutt's A Little Visitation bulletin letters every other week and articles from other staff members on the alternate weeks. We are happy to be back in 2022 and welcome your feedback.


Dear Folks,

                So this is the first bulletin column I have written in almost 2 years. I wonder how long it will take me to get the hang of it again. You might realize that sitting in front of the “Video Visitation” camera on Wednesdays is considerably simpler and easier than writing a bulletin column. I am over the initial disdain I felt for doing the video thing. When we began it I did not at all like the way I looked and sounded to myself. I thought, “Gee, is this what these poor people have to put up with week after week? How do they take it?” It seemed to me that my gestures were outsized, my inflections most peculiar, and my whole demeanor just sort of ill-fitting. I do not think I have been able to change my own gestures, inflections, and demeanor much, but I have come to think like Popeye. “I yam what I yam and that’s alls that I yam.” If you are among the hundreds of people who watch that thing every week, all I can say is thanks for putting up with me. Megan Burdolski, our highly capable parish stewardship officer, is the presence I constantly refer to as “the producer.” I have found that she and I have an unanticipated, but very effective, chemistry between us that makes the Video Visitations downright fun to do much of the time. We will keep doing them on at least a semi-weekly basis, with off weeks getting a bulletin column. I do not have a good sense of where this will go. Covid has not exactly killed the traditional paper bulletin but it is like the Kansas City Star-- a shadow of its former self. If I find over time that these written productions do not have the following that they once had I might just stop them altogether. 

There are advantages to the written stuff. For one thing, it affords me the more realistic chance to present an issue in a more carefully cogitated way. You know, I can sit here and mentally parse things as I write them in a way I cannot do when being videoed. For the balance of this column, I want to raise one of those issues and that is the Annual Catholic Appeal. No, I am not talking about the pledges you and I make to Visitation Parish every year, which is the parish appeal. I am referring to the “ask” that the Bishop of the Diocese of Kansas City-Saint Joseph makes of us on an annual basis. The diocesan Annual Catholic Appeal material was mailed to our homes in the same envelope in which the Visitation Parish Annual Report and pledge card were mailed.  You might remember it. It was a sort of pretty bluish-purplish envelope that opened out like an unfolded napkin. 

Well, truth to tell, I have done a lousy job of presenting the bishop’s Annual Catholic Appeal this year. I don’t have a good excuse except that this is a complicated place and I am alone in the sacerdotal parts of administration here. Other things got in the way; a spate of funerals that has yet to let up and the School Master Planning process are the major reasons. These things take a lot of time and much of what little psychic energy I have. But I am belatedly asking you now to please consider donating to the bishop’s appeal. I know some of you chafe at the idea because you believe withholding financial support from the wider Church is the only means you have of prodding the institution toward necessary reform. Believe me, I understand your point. As I was writing my own personal check to the diocese last week I had similar thoughts. But on the other hand, Bishop Johnston has, and is, working at the resolution of our local Church’s bigger problems. Yes, he has not been as alacritous at parts of it as I wish he had been, but he has been working at it and he is working at it more avidly right now. Ministerial ethics are supplied with serious people, and serious money, to help insure the safety and progress of souls entrusted to the care of diocesan personnel. Diocesan apostolates are at last being seriously evaluated in terms of pastoral and financial viability. A different and, we earnestly pray, fruitful approach is being taken toward the training of new priests and new pastors. These things are truly necessary, they are truly being attempted, and it truly costs money to get them done well. Expensive as they can be, their furtherance also costs the price of our encouragement. In the name of a picture bigger than today and a ministry wider than Visitation Parish, please remember the Annual Catholic Appeal when you consider where to apply your charitable dollars.  See you on paper again in two weeks!

 

In our Holy Communion,

Msgr. Bradley S. Offutt

 

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